Nicki Minaj Looks Back on Her COVID-19 Vaccine Claims Controversy: ‘I Like to Make My Own Assessment’

Nicki Minaj faced quite a bit of backlash in 2021 for sharing her stance against the coronavirus vaccine. Now, more than two years later, she’s still not walking back.

In one of the rapper’s biggest controversies to date, Minaj was accused of spreading misinformation back when the government first started rolling out preventative shots about a year and a half deep into the global pandemic. Revealing at the time that she wouldn’t be attending that year’s Met Gala because she hadn’t been vaccinated, which was required of guests, the “Barbie World” artist also tweeted that a cousin’s friend in Trinidad had become “impotent” after the COVID-19 vaccine allegedly caused his testicles to swell.

Her tweets earned concerned responses from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Trinidad & Tobago Health Minister and even the Philadelphia Health Department, each of them debunking her claim and emphasizing that there was no scientific basis to the side effects supposedly made by her cousin’s friend. She became the butt of late-night jokes and even went toe to toe with both the White House and Piers Morgan over the controversy. But in a new interview, Minaj had no regrets to share.

“I’m one of those people who doesn’t go with a crowd,” she told Vogue in her December cover story published Thursday (Nov. 9). “I like to make my own assessment of everything without help from everyone.”

“Every time I talk about politics, people get mad,” Minaj added. “I’m sorry, but I am not going to be told who I should get on social media and campaign for. There’s a lot we don’t know that’s going on in the government, and I don’t think it changes whether you lean to the left or right.”

The interview comes one month ahead of Minaj’s upcoming album, Pink Friday 2, which was originally scheduled to arrive Oct. 20 before being pushed back to Nov. 17. In late October, the Queen of Rap announced that the project would be postponed once more to Dec. 8, her 41st birthday.

See Nicki Minaj’s Vogue cover and photos below: